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Martins, Martins, everywhere, but only one to kill!

This week is an extra-long episode (an extra 12 minutes) thanks to Dodge and their amazing Ram Pickup Trucks. Thank you, Dodge.

Yet another Terminator has come back from the future to start killing friends of John Connor, just like most people never saw in the third Terminator movie. This time it’s someone named Martin Bedell that is important to do away with, because he’s an actual trained soldier that teaches the Resistance Fighters how to get themselves organized (in the future.) John and Derek head off to a military academy to protect Martin, and learn how to kick some ass in the process. Meanwhile, Sarah is protecting a different Martin Bedell—a young man with a book report and kind of a mommy complex. Also, Agent Ellison investigates the “near meltdown” incident from episode 11. (Full recap here.)

Can I just say something? Where has it been written that all scenes that take place in the future with present characters needs to involve giant facial scars? Hiro, Peter Petrelli, and now Martin Bedell. Is this “TV Writing for Dummies” or just “Stupid Screenwriting Tips”? Because if it’s the same actor in both scenes, and one scene is clearly taking place in a post-apocalyptic future, do we really need the retarded visuals to help us out? Is the audience that stupid?

What’s more complicated than the fact that the Martin character had unnecessary scarring was that the actor seemed exactly the same age in the future as he is in the present. This is incredibly confusing as far as placing Judgment Day goes. So let’s talk timelines. First, Judgment Day was 1997. Then, because of Terminator 3, it was moved to 2004. This still left time for Kyle Reese (John’s father) to be born after Judgment Day, as it’s been since the first Terminator movie was released in 1984. But with the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Judgment Day is moved yet again to 2011. Kyle Reese’s birthday is moved back, presumably, because he’s a not an infant in 2008, as one would expect (if Judgment Day had been moved to 2004, previously.) He’s also not 15, as he would be if he was born after the FIRST Judgment Day.

If you think this is confusing, just start thinking about all the timelines that are now running concurrently somewhere. There’s the timeline where Linda Hamilton is still Sarah Connor and Judgment Day was 1997. There’s the timeline where Linda Hamilton is dead and Judgment Day was 2004 and, most baffling, Claire Danes is in an action movie. There’s the timeline where Lena Headey is Sarah Connor, she’s timetraveled eight years into the future, is alive, and Judgment Day is in 2011. If this show gets picked up (and not canceled, as is feared,) then we’re presumably going to have to move Judgment Day again. (Not to mention my personal belief that there’s an original timeline where John Connor grows up knowing nothing about killer robots.)

Why is all this timeline business important? Because we are now in a year where Judgment Day still hasn’t happened, and Martin Bedell finds out about robots in highschool instead of post-apocalypse. The more and more they have “flashforwards” in Derek or Cameron’s life showing “what happens in the future,” the more and more I feel those flashfowards become irrelevant. Those stories very well may never happen at all on this timeline. So while I appreciate all this information to illustrate just how much post traumatic stress Derek Reese is suffering from; while I appreciate finding out that Cameron was based on a real, live, human—at some point it’s going to become too much. Already I’m thinking what’s the point of telling a teenaged John Connor how all his present friends are going to die, if he’s currently changing the situation that brings around the apocalypse?

Moreover, I wish to stop the horrible voiceover intro that says John and Sarah Connor are on a mission “to stop Skynet.” If there is one thing that Terminator 3 managed to do, it’s that it brought across the point that Skynet cannot be stopped. Progress will never be stopped. They can’t prevent the future from happening, they’re just screwing around with the details. Overall there’s still going to be progress in robotics, and artificial intelligence. Think about when you first saw The Terminator in the eighties. You didn’t have a blog, an MP3 player, DVDs, or laser printers. The idea of robots who could learn for themselves (in order to find and kill someone) seemed far out—so the idea of stopping those robots from ever existing didn’t seem like such a wacky idea.

These days it’s different. People not only enjoy advances in technology, they covet them. We crave being able to give personalities and identities to our electronics. When you set up a new iPod with iTunes, it actually asks you to name it. We are living in a society that encourages interaction with inanimate objects. All you have to do to get frustrated with the “Destroy Skynet” storyline is to re-watch this segment from a 2006 episode of Nova Science Now. Robotics experts like Cynthia Breazeal are currently developing artificial intelligence by trying to teach robots in the same manner we teach children.

So, clearly human interaction is important to the development of advanced robotics, and eventually the sort of cybernetics we see on The Sarah Connor Chronicles. They set this up quickly in the first season, by making it clear that Cameron observes body language, temperature, and facial expressions in order to calculate an appropriate response. We were smart enough to build robots to learn to do all that, but somehow one that’s been living with a house full of humans for several months doesn’t realize that grabbing small children by the neck and hoisting them up isn’t appropriate? When did she stop learning to blend in? Are the writers expecting us to chalk this up to “brainplug malfunction”?

SCC still has a long way to go in terms of telling robot stories I want to hear. It seems that for every episode that does a great job of establishing how curious Terminators actually are about humans (like in Allison From Palmdale,) they take a step back and have their non-human characters act… well, clichedly. Aren’t we past Lost In Space-type machines? Maybe Battlestar Galactica has ruined me as far as what I can expect from cyborgs on television, but with this show on the brink of cancellation, I would hope they’d stop re-hashing plots from the movies and start thinking outside of the box. It’s kind of sad when scientists are far more creative than writers.

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